Stefan Szczelkun: Exploding Cinema 1992 – 1999: Culture and Democracy (2002)

The Exploding Cinema is a fusion of projection, performance and social occasion. Architectural spaces, transformed with the use of slides and looped film projections, are used as the backdrop for a programme of short videos, film and performance. A ‘master of ceremonies’ sets up an informal dialogue with the audience, introduces the films and gives filmmakers who are present the chance to speak. She invites the audience to show their films in the future – with the promise that nothing will be censored and everything will be shown. By thoughtful programming this open way of soliciting material results in a varied and lively programme, which continues to attract large audiences.

The Exploding Cinema is democratically run by an open collective. In the last ten years it has put on more that 100 events, showing the work of around 1000 filmmakers, with audience numbers averaging around 200. It is fiercely independent of public grants and supports itself entirely from admission charges.

The group is contextualised against a background of, on the one hand, similarly open cultural formations experienced by the author since 1967 and, on the other, by a history of underground cinema and home movies.

Culture’s central function is taken as being the ongoing total qualitative assessement of any community’s condition. The need for a theoretical framework to develop this basic concept leads to a consideration of Jurgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1981) critiqued using Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. The relation between cultural expression, a community of understanding and democratic consensus is argued as being at the base of an appreciation of such collective activity.

Groups like Exploding Cinema are often complex and multi-layered, with multiple and dynamic authorship. Their discourses can be largely informal, oral and unrecorded. Research methods used should be transparent and their limitations acknowledged.
It is proposed that representations that arise from a triangulation of several methodologies would provide a better basis for historical discourse than any singular approach. Two methodologies are used to analyse existing data (Content Analysis and Semiotics) and two are used to obtain new data (Participant Observation and Oral History). The partial results of each of these are then brought together with traditional archival methods to construct a historical account in which thematic and chronological strands are interwoven.

Phd Thesis
School of Communications, Royal College of Art London, 2002

ExplodingCinema.org online resource

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Kinema Ikon catalogue (2005) [English/Romanian]

Kinema Ikon is the oldest active experimental art group in Romania. Founded in 1970 as a multimedia atelier at the art school in Arad it is currently hosted by the Arad’s History Museum and Art Museum. Coming from the various fields (art, literature, architecture, photography, music, programming), its members created in over four decades an astonishing variety of works ranging from experimental film, video art, through hypermedia to interactive installations.

The catalogue accompanied the Kinema Ikon retrospective exhibition held at the MNAC, Bucharest in October-December 2005, curated by Raluca Velisar and Stefan Tiron. The first volume covers the experimental films and videos produced by the group, the second volume features hypermedia works, and the third volume is dedicated to Intermedia magazine published since 1994.

Editor Kinema Ikon
Concept and design by Calin Man
Publisher MNAC – The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Museum Arad; Centrul Cultural Judetean Arad
102 / 104 / 48 pages

authors
Kinema Ikon on the Monoskop wiki

PDF (Volume 1)
PDF (Volume 2)
PDF (Volume 3)
View online (Issuu.com, Volume 1)
View online (Issuu.com, Volume 2)
View online (Issuu.com, Volume 3)

Tanja Vrvilo, Petar Milat (ed.): Visual Collegium Reader (2007) [Croatian/English]

Vizualni kolegij [Visual Collegium] has be initiated in 2004 with a purpose to open up new discursive domains within the field of visual studies in Croatia. Main activities are regular screenings in net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb, a continous multi-annual lecture-series and publication of theoretical texts.

With contributions by Alexander Horwath, Stephen Zepke, Cesare Casarino and Akira Mizuta-Lippit.

Published by Multimedia Institute, Zagreb; in collaboration with BLOK 2007
ISBN 9537372022
216 pages

PDF